The Network That Never Sleeps

Neurosurgery Residency Programs on Twitter (X): Current Use and Future Potential

OBJECTIVE

Twitter (X) is increasingly utilized by medical residency programs to boost engagement and potentially enhance ranking. This study aims to evaluate the role of Twitter (X) in neurosurgery residency programs, assessing their online activity, followership, and content to identify current practices and potential improvements.

METHODS

We identified 97/123 neurosurgery residency programs in the United States with Twitter accounts. Active accounts, posting in 2022 and 2023, were matched with the American Association of Neurological Surgeons Neurosurgical Residency Training Program Directory. Tweets from January 2022 through June 2023 were categorized as original or retweets and further subcategorized based on content. Descriptive and correlation analyses were conducted.

RESULTS

Twitter (X) accounts were found for 78.8% of accredited neurosurgery programs (n = 97/123), with 68.3% active as of July 2023 (n = 84/123). All active accounts amassed 167,068 followers. Among 5612 tweets identified, 2764 were original content, and 2848 were retweets. Tweets primarily focused on resident or program information (64.3%), research publications (32.0%), and conference participation (9.4%). Only 12.3% (n = 341) of original tweets contained public medical information. A significant correlation (r = 0.493, P < 0.001) was observed between Twitter (X) following and program ranking.

CONCLUSIONS

The majority of US neurosurgery residency programs actively use Twitter (X), primarily to showcase academic achievements and aid in recruitment. The correlation between Twitter following and program ranking suggests that online engagement reflects program visibility and impact, underscoring the importance of social media in program outreach and strategic management for maximizing program benefits.

How (Cautious) Social Media Use May Improve Education and Pipeline Efforts of a Growing Postpandemic Forensic Pathologist Workforce Shortage

ABSTRACT

Many subspecialties of pathology have initiated novel methods and strategies to connect with medical students and residents, stimulate interest, and offer mentorship. Emerging concern about the future of forensic pathology has been highlighted in contemporary literature as recruitment of new fellows has stagnated and workforce shortage concerns have blossomed. Amidst these challenges, the potential role of social networking platforms like social media (SoMe) in enhancing autopsy pathology/forensics education has garnered attention, yet literature focusing specifically on its application in autopsy and forensic pathology remains limited. This review aims to provide a comprehensive narrative overview of the current literature on the established uses of SoMe in forensic pathology. It seeks to build upon existing recommendations, introducing a contemporary compilation of online resources designed to facilitate virtual engagement among pathologists, learners, patients, and families. The review supports the idea that strategic, ethical, and conscientious use of SoMe has a place in addressing the growing workforce shortages and closing educational gaps in forensic pathology by enhancing exposure to the field and dispelling antiquated stereotypes.

A Reassessment of the Impact and Significance of Social Media to Pathology

CONTEXT

Social media (SM) use in pathology and medicine today is widespread, receives active advocacy, and is said to bring a host of benefits. In latter days, the harmful effects of SM have received attention, but they have yet been followed by greater encouragement of professionalized SM usage. SM use in medicine has seen adoption in parallel to its general ascendancy, even though the platforms are products with purposes misaligned with the practice of medicine.

OBJECTIVE

To (1) characterize premises and forces that propel professional SM platform adoption and use, and (2) examine wide-ranging literature, both medical and nonmedical, that substantiates the premises and to find counteracting perspectives and evidence.

DATA SOURCES

Review of the literature using relevant keyword searches in PubMed, Google Scholar, Dimensions, and Web of Science for articles that study/describe professional SM use in pathology and medicine. Additionally, we examined business, technology, and social sciences literature and high-quality gray literature (newspapers, books, blogs) that addressed questions in relation to the topic of professional SM adoption.

CONCLUSIONS

We identified 6 major premises as motivators of professional SM use and highlight significant counteracting factors. We conclude that the harms of professionalized SM use have not been fully considered in the medical literature and that a change in direction and the creation of new communication platforms would be beneficial.

A visual-language foundation model for pathology image analysis using medical Twitter

The lack of annotated publicly available medical images is a major barrier for computational research and education innovations. At the same time, many de-identified images and much knowledge are shared by clinicians on public forums such as medical Twitter. Here we harness these crowd platforms to curate OpenPath, a large dataset of 208,414 pathology images paired with natural language descriptions. We demonstrate the value of this resource by developing pathology language-image pretraining (PLIP), a multimodal artificial intelligence with both image and text understanding, which is trained on OpenPath. PLIP achieves state-of-the-art performances for classifying new pathology images across four external datasets: for zero-shot classification, PLIP achieves F1 scores of 0.565-0.832 compared to F1 scores of 0.030-0.481 for previous contrastive language-image pretrained model. Training a simple supervised classifier on top of PLIP embeddings also achieves 2.5% improvement in F1 scores compared to using other supervised model embeddings. Moreover, PLIP enables users to retrieve similar cases by either image or natural language search, greatly facilitating knowledge sharing. Our approach demonstrates that publicly shared medical information is a tremendous resource that can be harnessed to develop medical artificial intelligence for enhancing diagnosis, knowledge sharing and education.

Decline of case reports in pathology and their renewal in the digital age: an analysis of publication trends over four decades

AIMS

We investigated the trend in case reports (CRs) publication in a sample of pathology journals. Furthermore, we proposed an alternative publishing route through new digital communication platforms, represented by the 'social media case report'.

METHODS

28 pathology journals were selected from SCImago database and searched in PubMed to identify the number of published CRs. Four reference decades (1981-2020) were selected. The 5-year impact factor (IF) was retrieved from the Academic Accelerator database.

RESULTS

CRs increased during the first three decades (6752, 8698 and 11148, respectively; mean values: 355, 27.3%; 334, 26.4%; 398, 28.8%) as the number of CR-publishing journals (19, 26 and 28, respectively). In the last decade, CRs significantly decreased (9341; mean 334, 23.6%) without variation in the number of CR-publishing journals (28). Half of the journals reduced CRs (from -1.1% to -37.9%; mean decreasing percentage -14.7%), especially if active since the first decade (11/14, 79%); the other half increased CRs (from +0.5% to +34.2%; mean increasing percentage +11.8%), with 8/14 (57%) starting publishing in the first decade. The 5-year IF ranged from 0.504 to 5.722. Most of the journals with IF ≥2 (10/14, 71%) reduced the CRs number, while 71% of journals with IF <2 increased CRs publication (especially journals with IF <1, +15.1%).

CONCLUSIONS

CRs publication decreased during the last decade, especially for journals which are older or have higher IF. Social media CRs may represent a valid alternative and by using standardised templates to enter all relevant data may be organised in digital databases and/or transformed in traditional CRs.

The Influence of Social Media in Promoting Knowledge Acquisition and Pathology Excellence in Nigeria

The use of social media has evolved from platforms designed primarily for social connection and news sharing to include vibrant virtual academic environments. These platforms allow pathologists from across the globe to interact, exchange knowledge, and collaborate. Pathology in Nigeria, as in much of Africa, faces severe knowledge and practice gaps, with a lack of supporting modern laboratory infrastructure. Social media represents a potentially highly valuable avenue to help address some of these deficiencies. In this Perspective piece, we highlight our experience with the increasing role of social media in providing quality medical education in pathology globally, with an emphasis on how it bridges many of these gaps in Nigeria. Social media sites serve as sources of readily accessible, free, high-quality information to pathologists and trainees through academic discussions, quizzes, journal clubs, and informal consultations. They also provide opportunities for professional networking and research collaborations. Despite the availability and wide reach of these platforms, social media as a tool for advancement of knowledge in pathology is still undersubscribed in this part of the world. Improving awareness of and support for these tools will ideally help mitigate some of the challenges of practicing pathology in low and middle-income settings.

Social Media: Flattening Hierarchies for Women and Black, Indigenous, People Of Color (BIPOC) to Enter the Room Where It Happens

Social media platforms are widely used to connect people across multiple settings, including country of origin, profession, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, seniority, and training. Groups that have been marginalized or historically excluded from decision-making encounters may lack formal mentors/sponsors because of a lack of representation of women and Black, Indigenous, People Of Color (BIPOC) in senior leadership positions. This can serve as a barrier to professional advancement at all stages of career development. Identifying and connecting with these potential mentors/sponsors outside of one's institutional space can be challenging. For this reason, leveraging social media to develop these professional relationships through flattened hierarchies can allow for professional networking beyond traditional mechanisms. Here we aim to describe how individuals can connect through social media to advance their careers and scientific and clinical expertise, advocate for communities, and provide high-quality communication to the public.

Implementation and Effectiveness of a Completely Virtual Pathology Rotation for Visiting Medical Students

Objectives

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) upended in-person medical education, relocating many activities online. We designed a completely virtual pathology rotation to replace our traditional visiting rotation.

Methods

The virtual away rotation was listed in the Visiting Student Application Service (VSAS) and advertised on social media as well as various medical student mailing lists. Nine students were selected to participate in three month-long rotations. The virtual curriculum mirrored our typical in-person clerkship with didactic lectures and daily signout but also included activities exclusive to the virtual rotation such as digitally scanned slide trays and small-group problem-based learning. Anonymous surveys were conducted in which both participants and instructors rated their experiences.

Results

Postrotation feedback was overwhelmingly positive from both participants and instructors. Students considered virtual slide sessions as the most effective teaching tool and did not feel hindered overall by lack of in-person experiences. Volunteer trainee instructors indicated the experience improved their teaching and diagnostic skills and expressed interest in teaching future virtual courses.

Conclusions

The success of the virtual away rotation raises consideration for applications beyond the pandemic era and may provide a more level playing field for medical students from underrepresented groups.

Elevating Twitter-Based Journal Club Discussions by Leveraging a Voice-Based Platform: #HemepathJC Meets Clubhouse

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Social media-based scientific journal clubs provide an opportunity to promote published literature to a broader audience and allow robust multi-disciplinary and inter-professional discussion. Hematopathology Journal Club (#HemepathJC) on Twitter has successfully conducted monthly sessions since November 2019, covering topics related to lymphoma and leukemia.

RECENT FINDINGS

To enhance connectivity, multitasking, and productivity, we present our experience of leveraging the voice-based platform Clubhouse concurrent with Twitter. The Twitter and Clubhouse partnership for #hemepathJC holds the potential to increase dissemination of scientific knowledge and further promote journal club format discussion.

Integrative approaches to dispersing science: A case study of March Mammal Madness

OBJECTIVES

Public engagement is increasingly viewed as an important pillar of scientific scholarship. For early career and established scholars, navigating the mosaic landscape of public education and science communication, noted for rapid "ecological" succession, can be daunting. Moreover, academics are characterized by diverse skills, motivations, values, positionalities, and temperaments that may differentially incline individuals to particular public translation activities.

METHODS

Here we briefly contextualize engagement activities within a scholarly portfolio, describe the use of one public education program-March Mammal Madness (MMM)- to highlight approaches to science communication, and explore essential elements and practical considerations for creating and sustaining outreach pursuits in tandem with other scholarly activities.

RESULTS

MMM, an annual simulated tournament of living and fossil animal taxa, has reached hundreds of thousands of learners since 2013. This program has provided a platform to communicate research findings from biology and anthropology and showcase numerous scholars in these fields. MMM has leveraged tournament devices to intentionally address topics of climate change, capitalist environmental degradation, academic sexism, and racist settler-colonialism. The tournament, however, has also perpetuated implicit biases that need disrupting.

CONCLUSIONS

By embracing reflexive, self-interrogative, and growth attitudes, the tournament organizers iteratively refine and improve this public science education program to better align our activities with our values and goals. Our experiences with MMM suggest that dispersing science is most sustainable when we combine ancestral adaptations for cooperation, community, and storytelling with good-natured competition in the context of shared experiences and shared values.